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Apuleius and the Classical Canon University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (Classical Studies) Classical Studies at Penn 4-2010 Apuleius and the Classical Canon Joseph Farrell University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers Part of the Classics Commons Recommended Citation Farrell, J. (2010). Apuleius and the Classical Canon. Apuleius and Africa: An International Classics Conference, Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/129 These remarks were delivered at "Apuleius and Africa: An International Classics Conference," which took place at Oberlin College on April 29–May 2, 2010. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/129 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Apuleius and the Classical Canon Abstract I begin with the question, “Is Apuleius a canonical author?” Any answer that one might give would of course raise other questions; and in the context of this volume, the most important of these would be whether Apuleius’ African origin enters into it. But before confronting that question, I have to address a few others that are more basic. For one can hardly get started on this problem until asking, what is the canon and what forces govern its formation? Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Classics Comments These remarks were delivered at "Apuleius and Africa: An International Classics Conference," which took place at Oberlin College on April 29–May 2, 2010. This presentation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/129 Apuleius and the Classical Canon Joseph Farrell, University of Pennsylvania I begin with the question, “Is Apuleius a canonical author?” Any answer that one might give would of course raise other questions; and in the context of this volume, the most important of these would be whether Apuleius’ African origin enters into it. But before confronting that question, I have to address a few others that are more basic. For one can hardly get started on this problem until asking, what is the canon and what forces govern its formation? My inclination is to approach these questions practically as well as historically. During the “culture wars” of the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, the questions of what did or didn’t belong in the canon of western literature, why it did or didn’t belong, and whether there should even be such a canon and what legitimate purpose it might serve, were all hotly debated.1 It would be difficult to maintain that the matter was ever officially settled; but one result of that turmoil has been a greater openness to difference in the popular and professional evaluation of literature. Within the academy as a whole there is no question but that the range of authors taught and studied as literature is much larger than it was until thirty or even perhaps twenty years ago. And within Classical Studies specifically, where the amount of literature that survives from Greek and especially Roman antiquity is so small, there has nevertheless been a noticeable increase in the number of works that scholars study more or less for their own sake instead of for secondary purposes.2 But breadth of general interest may not tell us much about how the profession actually defines the canon; and if that is what interests us, then our inquiry more or less reduces to the mundane question of whether a writer’s name appears on graduate school reading lists. 1 For a convenient survey of these debates see Star 2002. 2 Although it has to be said that the recent expansion of interest in texts that were formerly little read is in large part due to a significant shift in what constitutes literary study away from belle lettres in the direction of social and cultural history. Farrell 2 Such lists can hardly be said to stir the passions of great numbers of people, and even as instruments for enforcing rigid standards of professional training they may be honored in the breach about as often as they are observed, with free substitution of one item or author for another characterizing the preparation of many students. But notwithstanding their practical flexibility, just because they are ubiquitous and, at least apparently, definite and explicit elements of all PhD programs, they are probably the most readily available indicator of what our discipline regards as the indispensable core of classical literature that an aspiring professional must know. So, what do they have to tell us? First, and unsurprisingly, such lists are fairly consistent from one program to the next. A group of about two dozen authors predominate on every list, and another dozen are usually represented in some form. And by this criterion, I am happy to report that Apuleius does seem to qualify as a canonical author. He is present on every list that I checked, along with authors such as Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Horace, Livy, Seneca, and Tacitus, and on more lists than authors such as Seneca the Elder, Persius, Statius, and Suetonius.3 I believe, though—and here I am relying on memory and inference rather than on actual research—that Apuleius’ status by this measure is fairly recent. I can remember quite clearly that in in the late seventies and early eighties, Apuleius was not on the reading list of my own program or of several others about which I knew.4 So I infer that Apuleius’ canonical status is relatively recent and that it has a lot to do with the heroic achievements of John Winkler, the Dartmouth Novel Conference, and a number of other individual scholars, including several represented in this volume.5 But I am inclined 3 My survey consisted of ten randomly chosen North American PhD programs whose Latin reading lists were available on their web sites at noon on August 27, 2012. 4 My memory of the program at Chapel Hill involves an episode in which one of my professors, in a course on Latin prose composition, was surprised when we students told him that there was no Apuleius on the PhD reading list, his opinion being that there should be because including Apuleius would help to represent the diversity and flexibility of the language. And it happens that I still have in my possession a copy of that reading list, which does in fact exclude Apuleius. In a discussion of Apuleius’ absence from 1980s reading lists at the Oberlin conference, Ellen Finkelpearl confirmed that he was not on the Harvard reading list, either, and that it was precisely this non-canonical status that attracted her to studying him. 5 Winkler 1985; Tatum 1994; one should also mention Schlam 1971 and 1992. The Groningen commentaries have their own, unique importance, although they began in an era when Apuleius was still Farrell 3 to consider his canonical status somewhat tenuous, partly because it is recent and partly because only one work, the Metamorphoses, tends to be required of PhD students; and it is unusual to require them to read much of that. In fact, there is even a sense in which these requirements are quite misleading, because they usually involve only the Cupid and Psyche episode, which is in many ways the most unrepresentative section of the novel, to say nothing of the remaining corpus.6 So Apuleius has become a canonical author, but for all these reasons perhaps a slightly marginal or eccentric one. Apuleius is marginal in another way as well, because on some reading lists he is the latest author represented. Where he is not the absolute latest, he generally precedes the next latest, if it is Ammianus, by a least a century and, if it is Augustine, by much more than that.7 And, if I am not mistaken, both of these authors are also fairly recent additions to these lists. But what is of special importance for our purposes is that Apuleius, along with Augustine when he is included, is the only African writer to be found, with the interesting exception of Terence, who has always been a fixture on all reading lists since antiquity. Now, someone might point to Terence, or indeed to Augustine, as proof that Apuleius’ place in the canon or out of it has nothing to do with the fact that he was from Africa. But the situation is rather more complex than that. regarded by many as orbiting well beyond the Kuiper Belt of Classical Studies, and later volumes retain more than a little of the project’s originary spirit, even if one can detect the progressive influence of the Zetigeist, as well. 6 Instructive is the way in which Apuleius is represented in another quasi-canonical form, the estimable series of Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, popularly known as “green and yellows.” The point is that Kenney 1990 is not green and yellow, but two shades of purple, because it belongs to the “Imperial Library,” which, in the words of the press, “has been established as a part of Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics to accommodate titles that fall outside the conventional canon but are works of genuine interest and literary quality” (http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/series/series_display/item3936987/?site_locale=en_US, retrieved 3:43 pm EDT on August 27, 2012). As of this writing there are four volumes in this series, as against eighty-six green and golds. As in many reading lists, the only Latin author represented besides Apuleius is the much later Augustine, and the only portion of Apuleius’ novel represented in the Cupid and Psyche episode. See O’Donnell 1991. 7 The Brown program was the only one I found that requires students to read authors such as Ausonius, Boethius, Claudian, Macrobius, Mamertinus, Prudentius, Sidonius, and Symmachus.
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